Environmental Changes: Will Our Kids Suffer Most?

Summary: Children suffer a much greater burden of climate-related disease than adults.

Air Date: 6/25/14

Duration: 10

Host: Melanie Cole, MS

Guest Bio: Jerome A. Paulson, MD

Jerome A. Paulson, MD, is Professor of Pediatrics and Professor of Environmental & Occupational Health at the George Washington University Schools of Medicine and of Public Health. He is the Medical Director for National & Global Affairs of the Child Health Advocacy Institute and director of the Mid-Atlantic Center for Children’s Health at the Children’s National Medical Center. Dr. Paulson chairs the executive committee of the Council on Environmental Health of the American Academy of Pediatrics and serves on the Children’s Health Protection Advisory Committee for the US EPA. In 2004 he was a Dozor Visiting Professor at Ben Gurion University in Beer Sheva, Israel. He was a recipient of a Soros Advocacy Fellowship for Physicians from the Open Society Institute and worked with the Children’s Environmental Health Network, and has also served as a special assistant to the director of the National Center on Environmental Health of the CDC working on children’s environmental health issues.

Children suffer a much greater burden of climate-related disease than adults.

According to the World Health Organization, more than 80% of the current health burden due to the changing climate occurs in children younger than five years old.

These health impacts include the broad effects of weather disasters, increases and range-shifts in climate sensitive infections, increases in allergic and asthmatic diseases, food and water insecurity and increased heat-related deaths.

In this segment of Healthy Children, Dr. Jerome A. Paulson explains how children are affected by climate change and what you can do to keep them as healthy as possible.